The main topic on last weekend’s round of talk shows and political roundtables was whether there is a meaningful analogy to be drawn between the US experience in Vietnam and current debates over our policy in Afghanistan and its somewhat dubious future. There are no such things as perfect analogies, of course, but suggestive connections there surely are.
Most of them received a helpful airing.
But one matter of real and growing concern was not discussed. The transition from a French police action to a US war was one important transition well described by various experts from all bands of the political spectrum. But the transition from Kennedy’s police action to Johnson’s war has received less attention that it should have.
The story that was told this weekend involved a charismatic young president, relatively new to office, facing pressure from many of his military advisors to commit to significant troop increases in Vietnam. Kennedy resisted, due in no small part to the cautionary advice of some of his closest staff advisors. Well after his assassination, in 1966, President Johnson significantly upped the military ante, and the troop numbers, committing the US to an all-out land and air assault; that was when the staggering casualties, on both sides, commenced.
The analogy as I have set it up paints President Obama in the role of John Kennedy, young and charismatic and new to office, receiving some pressure from his military advisors to commit to an Iraq-style “surge” in Afghanistan. Other close advisors, like his more experienced Vice President, insist that we are in no hurry, especially now that the regime we are supporting has been so badly de-legitimated by the recent elections.
But the analogy subtly suggests that the difficult position in which President Obama currently finds himself is Johnson’s dilemma, not Kennedy’s. It has something to do with the changing face of “success.” In Vietnam, the goal was to keep the communists out. We failed in that mission. In Afghanistan, success used to be similarly defined: to kick out the Taliban and then to keep them out. Failing that, success has recently been redefined in truly mystifying terms by Special Envoy Holbrook as something “we will know when we see it.”
Clearly, that is not a mission. The fact is that we are already committed to this thing; we are already in. And while many of us may want to get out, the question is how?
The challenge Obama faces is how to manage the transition into his own presidency. He inherited the Bush economy; but now, with his Gaithner-style “reforms” firmly in place, the economy is his team’s, not Bush’s.
So too with the wars. What is happening is that both of these theaters, in Iraq and Afghanistan, are in the process of becoming Obama’s wars, and Obama’s problems, not Bush’s or Cheney’s anymore.
It is now that a final disturbing feature of the analogy also begins to come into sharper focus. The analogy reveals how both of these wars were, in strange ways, wars of religion.
Ever since the Second World War, US Cold War reasoning posited our democratic freedoms against an atheistic and tyrannical communism. It was a “cold war” of religion, religion pitted against non-religion. The current conflicts have some of that same flavor, where Islam has replaced communism as the ideological bete noir of the 21st century.
This connection has been brilliantly drawn in a recent book by Carol K. Winkler, In the Name of Terrorism: Presidents on Political Violence in the Post World War 2 Era. Drawing on extensive pre-9/11 research in a number of presidential libraries before they were closed to free public scrutiny, Winkler demonstrates how the language of “terror” has been a free-wheeling presidential signifier, easily exploited to justify any war against any enemy, from Vietnam to Bosnia to Afghanistan.
We should watch very closely as this new President grapples with the subtler implications of an unsettling analogy he has inherited, along with two wars.
